Dr Brian Klass and ‘Democracy’

A Dr.  preaching neo-orientalism, imperialism and patronizing other countries, brandishing an empty term ("democracy) of the West, i.e. the capitalist, imperialist democracy of the Western powers that we have seen in practice not only in wars and occupations, but in IMF adjustment programmes, in global capitalism's uneven development, in plunder by corporations, in NGOs working with repressive regimes and perpetuating power structure, in Western powers working with local regimes in aborting, diverting or co-opting uprisings or confining it to the parliamentary capitalist democracy, oppression within the undemocratic European Union itself, level of corruption on an unprecedented scale, driving down wages, undermining unions (even banning people from joining a union), gambling with pensions, corporatization of education, undermining academic freedom, a development of an oligarchy and a mediaocracy, depolitization, passivity and narcissism, a plague called identity politics instead, the rise of the far-right as a consequence of neo-liberalism and a crisis of the nation-state.

You don't have to read the book. The rhetoric of the West's mission to spread "democracy" and the title of the post are quite telling. According to Dr. Brian Klass's "democracy" is when "citizens have a meaningful voice in determining how governments make decisions about their lives." That is the narrow, mainstream concept of democracy that we hear everyday. That implies that Western citizens through the voting process are "determining how governments make decisions about their lives". 

Dr Klass condemns using violence to spread democracy. The use of violence is not the main and the initial means of "spreading democracy". "Democracy" (i.e., free market and privatisation, stability, political dependency, debt, monopoly of  the media, etc) has been imposed through peaceful means: unequal trade deals, economic adjustment programmes, perpetuation of uneven development, geopolitical interests, aborting people uprisings, support of the "moderates" against the progressives and the leftists, propgating the bourgeois concept of women's freedom and culturalizing social antagonisms,  

The argument of "spreading democracy" is inherently flawd because reactionary powers cannot by their nature spread democracy. The history of imperialism in the Middle East, Latin America and Indonesia, for instance, is rife with the Western war on democracy.